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Co-management approaches in forestry have frequently failed to fulfill their promise and have generated unexpected conflicts. This is partly because they intersect with a plurality of interests and concerns, in settings that are more socially, institutionally and ecologically differentiated and dynamic than is often assumed. This article engages with current debates around pluralism in community forestry, and illustrates how they can be informed by a better understanding of institutional dynamics. It begins by characterizing the dynamic forest landscapes in which community forestry processes are enacted. It goes on to sketch out some analytical tools that can help illuminate these processes, and which expose the links between interests in forests, resource access and control, and institutions. In this context, the third part of the article illustrates how institutional dynamics can work out in practice when villagers, governmental, non-governmental and donor agencies interact in the practice of community forestry. The need to take account of multiple institutions and power relations, to manage pluralism rather than necessarily attempting to achieve consensus, and to appreciate social and ecological uncertainties, suggests that forest management should seek to influence processes rather than to define states, and be adaptive rather than pre-planned.

Metadata only record ; This article considers how environmental problems are produced and interpreted, using case material from West Africa's humid forest zone. Examining the experiences of several countries over the long term, it is possible to identify a deforestation discourse produced through national and international institutions. This represents forest and social history in particular ways that structure forest conservation but which obscure the experience and knowledge of resource users. Using fine-grained ethnography to explore how such discourse is experienced and interpreted in a particular locale, the article uncovers problems with 'discourse' perspectives which produce analytical dichotomies which confront state and villager, and scientific and 'local' knowledges. The authors explore the day-to-day encounters between villagers and administrators, and the social and historical experiences which condition these. Instances where the deforestation discourse becomes juxtaposed with villagers' alternative ideas about landscape history prove relatively few and insignificant, while the powerful material effects of the discourse tend to be interpreted locally within other frames. These findings present departures from the ways relations between citizen sciences and expert institutions have been conceived in recent work on the sociology of science and public policy.